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I often get chided at work for preferring the Java programming language. My colleagues hold the opinion that it's not-free. Free here means open source. I disagree and recently read a Stallman "article" called Free But Shackled - The Java Trap.

The "article" basically says the license of the release is what matters, and not the dependencies of it. For example, in the history of GNU/Linux, there were times when there was no free kernel, or no free c library, or no free terminal software. Yet the applications that developers wrote were still considered free. Well it's the same with Java. There used to be a time when there were no free JVMs. Luckilly now there are.

These compliers and virtual machines are not as complete as Sun's, however there has been much improvement in recent years. A while back i remember getting Ant to run on GIJ. In the process, i found this bug which i hope is fixed by now.